With the advent of network communications, more and more organizations are becoming interested in taking advantage of new features and functionality that network applications provide. One of the useful features provided by networked communication is allowing individuals in an organization or members of the public to obtain information about other individuals associated with a particular organization.
Large organizations in which individuals are geographically spread out or in which there is a high degree of employee movement or turnover suffer from a problem of not being able to locate, contact and obtain information on different individuals within the organization. A present solution to this problem is to publish (on paper) an organizational or corporate directory listing of names, departments, telephone numbers and other contact information relating to individuals within the organization. The distribution of such a corporate directory to all persons interested in its contents presents an enormous logistical problem.
With the advent of Intra-company and Inter-company communications, as well as network access to organizational computer systems, a computer application may be loaded onto a computer server so that individuals are able to obtain immediate and current access to the organization's resources.
With more and more companies and organizations implementing internal networks and connecting themselves to the Internet, Internet based applications are proliferating.
The task facing organizations wishing to publicize information about individuals within, is to create an accurate, accessible, easy to use and up-to-date mechanism to store and display personal information about each of those individuals. A traditional solution is to create a specialized computer application which stores such information. However, setting up such an application requires a high level of skill. When persons set up such applications are not adequately skilled and knowledgeable the results are often haphazard and fraught with bugs. There are often problems in making the application accessible to the public.